Most people I know realize that for the past 10+ years the fall has been one of the busiest times of the year for me as trade show season ramped up for the IT workers in the US. This year will be no exception. The difference being that I am at a new company and have lots of different responsibilities now, including helping to organize our sponsored sessions for VMworld along with the rest of my team. This is where it actually got fun…

This year we were able to talk the powers that be at Cohesity into not taking the standard product pitch approach to VMworld sessions, nicely that also included community sessions that our team is involved in. This turned into 9 speaking sessions between full sessions and vBrownbag slots not to include the booth theatre. I am involved in 6 of the 9 and hopefully readers can come out to them.

I also am moderating a great customer panel with Wendy’s, Hyatt, Dolby and the San Francisco Giants all about their trials and tribulations around data protection from the days of tape to current backup and recovery solutions.

I have for over 10 years hosted the vExpert Daily which is a great panel discussion each day at 11am in the vBrownbag area. Thats has become a highlight of the week for sure. I also have another session in the vBrownbag area to talk about some Fraggle Rock.

The most important session I will be part of though is a full 60 min panel discussion on Work-Life Balance where we will present the results of a study we commissioned along with TechReckoning. If you haven’t filled it out, please do here. I am really looking forward to presenting the results, talking through the stories of burnout from the panel and the audience and bringing some awareness to something I know went through and still battle with and many of my readers have as well.

Often people ask me how much I travel and if you ask my friends at home you will probably hear numbers ranging from 50% to 80% but is that really accurate? I found that without real data thats hard to calculate so when I started needing to make sure that a team was not traveling over X% throughout the year I needed a way to know what that really meant.

There are quite a few things to consider and this is just a short list of them.

Do you count weekends?

Do you count holidays?

Are you traveling on back to back weeks?

Are you traveling on weekend days?

Do those weekend days count as work days?

I tried to account for all of these items along with the ebbs and flows of the year. You may travel more in the summer and fall but not as much in the winter time so the percentage is really throughout the whole year.

I created this google sheet to help me calculate the real times for the team. Be careful there are a lot of formulas throughout that are very easy to break but you should be able to make a copy and use it to your hearts content. I left a bunch of larger events in the master event list just to make everyones life a little easier.

I had the good fortune of being an early adopter of the title Field CTO which is a wonderful thing except thats not the last job I want to have so what is my career progression. I didn’t even think about that 5 years ago when I took the position and as I have seen other friends and colleagues move into the role they are in the same position.

Let’s first look at what a Field CTO is. It’s a great title that encompasses the combination of technical prowess and people skills. The challenge is that that is very broad and every company seems to define it differently, even to the level of where the position lies in the organization. I reported up through the product management side, I know others that have reported to sales and others to marketing. I know some that have their own teams and some that are solo acts. It seems very company dependent. The skill set being asked for also varies from a very technical CTO style to a super SE and even at times to just a marketing evangelist.

With all the different types of jobs and roles the next question is how does one end up in this role? I believe there are 2 ways, the first is that the person has been in house and has knowledge across so many areas of the business that you don’t want to lose them and the title is a stepping stone. The second is someone who comes into a company specifically to fill that senior technical field role when a natural CTO is not as presentable to customers. What both of these have in common is that rarely does a company have a growth plan in place before filling the position.

Once you are a Field CTO what is the next role? During my interview process when changing jobs I found this to be a harder topic than I realized. My position being in Product Management seemed to worry people that I would not be able to be as outward focused as they wanted. Then I had the concern about any position I was talking to would be a step down career wise so they assumed I would not take it. I even had one company that thought because I had field experience I must not be technical at all and I was just a marketer.

I decided that I would just have to look at the title and determine on my own if I was interviewing someone would it look like a step down, when I said no then the title was fine. I never really cared about the title except for that anyway. Then I had to hope my years of experience came through during the interview process to show I had both technical chops and personality. For me I think I will end up back in a people manager/mentor type role while still having my hands on some tech to know the product, but for now I choose a role that lets me use my outbound and technical skills. Who knows maybe the next one will be a CEO or a CTO or a position I have never heard of yet.

I don’t claim to know what the next position is but I truly hope that those in the position now are able to talk to their management teams and figure it out since this won’t be your last job.

That was what I said just over 7 years ago when I got asked to join Nexenta. I saw a product that was looking to change an industry and a new and exciting opportunity. Over the last 7 years I have not been disappointed at all but there comes a time for change and today is that day.

After working at resellers, Nexenta was the first vendor I decided join and I started as a Sales Engineer before moving into a Director role and then only a year in to a role working in Product Marketing. I had less than zero knowledge outside my schooling and outside experience on marketing but management gave me a chance. After another short year and some company changes I got shifted into Product Management and day to day work with development and engineering teams. I never expected it to be a good move and I dreaded it at the time, I would have to leave the field. Much to my surprise, I found this new role to be exciting and challenging and I had to learn an entirely new side of IT. The next move was probably the most exciting for my career when I was asked to partially return to my roots and go back out into the field as the Field CTO. This meant I got to work with our largest customers and prospects and now knowing the product management side I was also able to translate all the customer needs and wants into engineering requirements. Overall the career progression at Nexenta was amazing but that pales in comparison to the people I have met. I can not thank them enough, even the ones that have left and asked me why I stayed so long.

And on that note, I stayed because I was waiting for the right position with the right company and today I start in what I believe will be that position. Today marks day one with Cohesity as a Principal Technologist (More later on the challenges of going from Field CTO to anything) . I will be joining a team of amazingly talented people that are well known in each of their respective communities, Chris Colotti, Jon Hildebrand and Teresa Miller. The four of us make up the TAG or Technical Advocacy Group and are focused on the outbound technical messaging. This time around I didn’t just look for great tech, which I do believe Cohesity has, but also a great company that is growing and dynamic. I am excited to hit the ground running for a new challenge!

Over the past couple weeks leading up to Super Bowl 53, there have been numerous articles, although many with the same copied content, published that proclaim that the two men on the LA Ram’s Cheerleading team are the first male cheerleaders to perform at the Super Bowl. While these two men being able to join their teammates on the field for the Super Bowl is a great accomplishment, they are actually closer to the 26th or 27th male cheerleaders to perform at the Super Bowl.

Starting in 1998 the Baltimore Ravens have had a Cheerleading team that consists of 2 groups, a dance team and a stunt team. Both groups perform choreographed routines together for every home game and have twice performed as a group at the Super Bowl.

2001 Super Bowl Baltimore Ravens Male Cheerleaders

During Super Bowl 35 I had the great honor of being one of those male cheerleaders and was part of the true first group of male cheerleaders to perform at the Super Bowl. At the time being the first group was not really a concern to any of us, it was amazing to be on the sideline and on the field and in the endzone with my teammates. The greatest part for me was at a practice in Baltimore just after the AFC Championship when were told by David Modell that after almost no thought, the organization was taking the entire Baltimore Ravens Cheerleading Team to the game and as an added bonus we could bring someone to watch. I called my dad, being able to ask him to go see the super bowl made up for much of the ridicule and pettiness that was directed at male cheerleaders prior to the last few years.

2001 Baltimore Ravens Cheerleaders during the Super Bowl

Some people have said that they are making the distinction that the LA Rams men are the first cheerleaders because they are dancing in the same routines. Is that to say that the women that were stunting with the men on the Ravens team are not cheerleaders because they do different parts in a routine? The male cheerleaders I know are proud to be called cheerleaders, we are not stuntmen as one article put it, we don’t just run flags, we are part of a program and part of a family and occasionally even dance in the routines. In fact there is even an interesting fact posted by CBS in 2016 about the only male cheerleaders in the NFL

Baltimore Ravens Male Cheerleaders Dancing In an EndZone Routine

In no way do I want to take away from the excitement and achievements of Quinton Peron and Napoleon Jinnies, going to the Super Bowl is a great achievement and one they should be very proud of. In this age of accessibility, I hope that some news outlets look a little deeper, maybe talk to some of my teammates, both the men and women, or some of the members of the 2013 Ravens team that also took an entire group of male cheerleaders to the Super Bowl.

I often get tasked with finding out where some of the limits of our products might be and one of them that has come up is the ability to work with larger Active Directory configurations. Running a lab I obviously don’t have thousands of users so I wanted a way to quickly create and remove users and groups. In comes the powershell scripts that I have below. I created this is multiple parts but have since made each part a function and put a nice menu around it. The final BulkAdd.ps1 is the total script that you are free to download and use for your environment. You can follow the flow in the diagram below.

You can get the full script Bulk-Menu_v2 but I will list all the parts below. All of the scripts start the same way and I have some centralized variables at the top of the main script.

VMworld 2018 once again proved to be one of the biggest technology events of the year, yes you can point out Dreamforce and OracleWorld and Microsoft Ignite as potentially larger but VMworld is still a ~20K person conference and ranks as one fo the larger ones around. Its also no surprise that VMware takes the time to make major product announcements during the show to make it exciting and get the user base hyped for another year. This year I heard alot about how the release of Amazon RDS Services natively in a private datacenter and connected as a custom region in AWS was the biggest news. While I I do believe this is a great thing for many enterprises and specifically cloud first companies, I don’t think it will be the release that has the largest impact on the future of VMware.

Welcome vSphere on ARM! Yes ARM, that little processor you hear about for cell phones and IoT devices. This was touched on in one of the keynotes and I think alot of people just thought it was a gimmick and since there is no firm release date, thats reasonable but lets for a moment take a look at a few places that vSphere on ARM could have a huge impact.

Over the past few years I have heard about so many people that have cut the cord and got rid of traditional cable TV, this seemed like a great way to save money but could my wife and I really do it and not get annoyed? Also would it really save us alot of money? Spoiler : We save about $115 a month but it could be more.

Over the next few paragraphs, I will take you through my journey from all in with xFinity to only paying them for internet and using multiple services and pieces of hardware but having a rather good experience.

Over the next few post I will break down the cord cutting into a few areas that you may only need a few pieces of so to help it will be in a few articles.

This part is two fold. First its the experience of actually telling Xfinity that I was done. This wasn’t too bad but just stick to your guns. I could not do it online and had to call them and she tried to figure out what other packages I could use, even acting shocked when I said we had never picked up the land line we used to have but only had it because it was cheaper with a triple play than with a double play. Once we got past the part where I constantly turned down the extra offers we got to the point of figuring out what internet only plan I wanted. My current plan was for 200 mbps, which for most people was probably fine but was going to be about $80 a month anyway. I asked what they had better, after I had already researched online but I gave her a shot. She claimed she could only do a 400 mbps or a 600 mbps. I politely inquired about a gigabit service I had heard about, “oh well we could do that but you would need a new cable modem/router” Since I spend the $10 fee every month to rent the router from Xfinity this seemed like something that should not have been an issue. I spoke with her a little longer and found out that gigabit to my house was $115 a month. Since I have all my smart home components plus we planned to only stream this seemed like a no brainer. It did require them to come install it which was more so they could configure it to the house but that was actually handy because I could turn in all my old cable boxes to the technician and didnt have to ship them.

Everything was going well with the install but after a day or two of testing I found my Ubiquiti AC-LR access points could just not handle the speed well for me and needed an upgrade. I have been a big fan of the Ubiquiti gear but it is expensive, this was when i found the Google Wifi mesh network. For $249 for a 3 pack on Amazon I figured I would try them and worse case return them. I was very happy with them. The install took less than 15 minutes and they are tucked away and hardly noticeable.

I did add the CloverTale outlet wall mount that was $10 just to make things easy. I will say that this is engineered very well The cable coils completely behind the mount and it hands from my outlet without any problem at all. I expected this since I have similar for my Amazon Echo Dots .

Overall I have been very happy with the google wifi. I switched the Xfinity wireless off and am running all my devices through the Google Wifi, it makes them very easy to manage, including port forwarding, DHCP, DHCP reservations, custom DNS and all from an easy app. I did find that the range was good for my house (1200 sq ft.) however I did end up adding 2 more access points to extend the range for our deck and for our outdoor cameras.

Probably the most important part of making this decision was making sure we could still watch the things we wanted. I did trials with Sling, PSVue and DirectTVNow. While each of them had rather decent interfaces and some channels, I had a few criteria that needed to be met:

Provide access to major networks (Be warned that no one had CBS yet)

Good Interface on Amazon FireStick, Apple TV and Mobile

Game Show Network (We watch a lot fo Family Feud when just sitting around)

DVR Functionality – O later determined I didn’t need this but more on that to come.

All seems pretty simple except PSVue didnt have GSN, Sling had it but it was an extra plan. In the end I ended up with DirectTVNow for everything except the DVR function which Sling didnt have either. What DirectTVNow did have was a free Apple TV 4K if you paid for 4 months upfront. I had to use one of the old gmail tricks for this however. My account is not my basic email but rather I used a + in my email since gmail ignores that. I normally would not need to do this but the free AppleTV was for new subscribers only and if you have done the trial it wont work. I didnt have to have the new AppleTV but one of mine was a version 3 and could not get apps so this seemed like a good reason. More on the AppleTV in the next blog.